Blog posts written by Robin Winslow

Robin Winslow
7 October 2015

Keynotes from my first PyCon – friendly and inspiring

Ubuntu Featured

Last weekend I went to my first Pycon, my second conference in a fortnight. The conference runs from Friday to Monday, with 3 days of talks followed by one day of “sprints”, which is basically a hack day. PyCon has a code of conduct to discourage any form of othering: Happily, PyCon UK is a ...

Robin Winslow
7 October 2015

Python learnings from PyCon

Ubuntu Featured

The weekend before last, I went to PyCon UK 2015. I already wrote about the keynotes, which were more abstract. Here I’m going to talk about the other talks I saw, which were generally more technical or at least had more to do with Python. Summary The talks I saw covered a whole range of ...

Robin Winslow
28 September 2015

Prepare for when Ubuntu freezes

Ubuntu Notes

I routinely have at least 20 tabs open in Chrome, 10 files open in Atom (my editor of choice) and I’m often running virtual machines as well. This means my poor little X1 Carbon often runs out of memory, at which point Ubuntu completely freezes up, preventing me from doing anything at all. Just a ...

Robin Winslow
18 August 2015

Django behind a proxy: Fixing absolute URLs

Ubuntu Notes

I recently tried to setup OpenID for one of our sites to support authentication with login.ubuntu.com, and it took me much longer than I’d anticipated because our site is behind a reverse-proxy. My problem I was trying to setup OpenID with the django-openid-auth plugin. Normally our sites don’t include absolute links (https://example.com/ ...

Robin Winslow
5 August 2015

Vanilla: Creating a modular Sass library

Ubuntu Notes

We recently introduced Vanilla framework, a light-weight styling framework which is intended to replace the old Guidelines framework as the basis for our Ubuntu and Canonical branded sites and others. One of the reasons we created Vanilla was because we ran into significant problems trying to use Guidelines across multiple different sites ...

Robin Winslow
11 March 2015

A seachange in front-end best practice (but not for a while)

Ubuntu Featured

Despite some reservations, it looks like HTTP/2 is very definitely the future of the Internet. Speed improvements HTTP/2 may not be the perfect standard, but it will bring with it many long-awaited speed improvements to internet communication: Sending of many different resources in the first response Multiplexing requests to prevent block ...

Robin Winslow
28 January 2015

Auto-syncing revision history from Github to Launchpad

Ubuntu Featured

In the design team we keep some projects in Launchpad (as canonical-webmonkeys), and some project in Github (as UbuntuDesign), meaning we work in both Bazaar and Git. The need to synchronise Github to Launchpad Some of our Github projects need to be also stored in Launchpad, as some of our systems only have access to ...

Robin Winslow
27 January 2015

Converting projects between Git and Bazaar

Ubuntu Featured

Here in the design team we use both Bazaar and Git to keep track our projects’ hostory. We quite often end up coverting our projects from Bazaar to Git or vice-versa. Here are some tips on how to do that. To convert revision history between Git and Bazaar, we will use their respective fast–import features. ...

Robin Winslow
9 September 2014

Supporting net neutrality and the Internet Slowdown

Ubuntu Services

On 10th September 2014, Canonical are joining in with Internet Slowdown day to support the fight for net neutrality. Along with Reddit, Tumblr, Boing Boing, Kickstarter and many more sites, we will be sporting banners on our main sites, www.ubuntu.com and www.canonical.com. If there were Internet slow lanes, you’d still be waiting. Protec ...

Robin Winslow
28 August 2014

Saving ubuntu.com on download day: Caching location specific pages

Ubuntu Featured

On release day we can get up to 8,000 requests a second to ubuntu.com from people trying to download the new release. In fact, last October (13.10) was the first release day in a long time that the site didn’t crash under the load at some point during the day (huge credit to the infrastructure ...